Jo and Victoria at dug den - Nov 3, 2011Why can’t Jo be more like Lily and Braveheart? Lily and Faith settled at a den nearly 3 weeks ago. Braveheart did the same a few weeks ago too. Jo continues to roam. She’s covered over 4 miles since mid-day on Thursday. Late Thursday, we saw Jo’s GPS locations heading for a road. It was late in the day but it was a chance to change batteries easily.
dug den - Nov 3, 2011While we were driving to them, Jo and Victoria paused and started digging a den. They had maybe 20-30 minutes to throw dirt up to 8-10 feet out of the den before we arrived. We’d always wondered how quickly bears can dig. The soft sand in this spot might have allowed maximum speed. The picture shows the progress. The den wasn’t complete, though, and we wondered if they might hit a boulder and be stymied. We changed the batteries, took a heart rate and left. The heart rate was steady at 75 per minute, which didn’t give us hope that she would be denning up soon. She and Victoria spent the night near the den.
Friday morning, they moved on. By Friday evening, they had circled back towards the den but went right on by. At 6:09 PM, they sent their last GPS location of the day.
Midday today (Saturday), with no further GPS locations from Jo, we suspected a problem with her GPS unit. We found she was still traveling, giving us a chance to see what she was up to. We watched Jo dig here and there as if testing the soil, tear open logs for grubs, and lick up snow fleas under the leaf litter. Snow fleas are a common food when they first emerge in spring, but this was the first we knew of bears eating snow fleas in fall.
Jo in open pine forest - Nov 5, 2011Jo did a lot of scent-marking—Victoria much less. Jo cooled off in a pond with her dense winter coat on this 51-degree, sunny day. Then they began moving east with Sue scrambling to keep up. The bears came to a fence surrounding one of the old open-pit mines and followed it until they came to a place where the fence sagged. Jo easily climbed over. Victoria continued on until she found a log leaning on the fence to help her over. The bears simply climbed down the steep wall of the open-pit mine and up the other side. They took a short cut through the mine while Sue had to detour far around the mine and be picked up miles from her vehicle.
We caught up to them a half mile away in open woodland, finished changing the GPS unit, and took a heart rate. This time Jo’s heart was irregular and only 66 beats a minute—signs of slowing down. Will they go to an ideal den, or will they settle for something less at this date? A picture shows Jo as we left her at late dusk in a nice open pine forest safe in Soudan Underground Mine State Park.
Part 1 of the video footage of Jo and Victoria from today is available athttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNVstGi2ttA.
eastern chipmunk larder dug up by bearJo is not the only bear still active. A few days ago, an adult male dug up an eastern chipmunk burrow to get the food the chipmunk had stored for winter. We had wondered if black bears would dig up chipmunk larders. The pit in the picture is our first evidence of it. The dirt was littered with seeds the chipmunk had stored. Black bears are not the diggers grizzly bears are. Grizzlies have long claws for digging. Black bears have shorter, more curved claws for climbing.
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center